Dumb Question about orca and GNOME menu options

[Buddy Brannan]

Hi all,

OK, getting my hand back in the GNU/Linux thing. Finally I have a  
machine that's got enough umpf (technical term) to run GNOME and orca.  
Which is to say the Celeron/800 finally croaked and I got a P4/1.8/1GB  
RAM, cheap. Seems to do OK. Eventually I reckon I'll put Cepstral  
voices on and all that, but first--

I'm fairly sure this was addressed somewhere, but here goes. Ubuntu  
8.10, desktop CD. Installed it after trying out Vibuntu (before the  
name change) and deciding that I didn't really want it to log in as  
orca and have that account hanging around. So, installed the old way,  
i.e. stopping orca and sudo to run ubiquity after restarting orca as  
root. All good. Now, how again do I get things like shut down and log  
off dialogs to speak? They come up as inaccessible to orca, and I  
suspect this has something to do with permissions things are running  
under, but I think I need a bit more direction.

FWIW, I had the same soundcard issue as a previous poster with 9.04.  
No sound at all with 9.04.

Thanks,
Buddy